Vernacular Religion and Repression
Earlier in the Middle Ages, after the Norman Conquest, English had been the language of the working people, as Latin was the language of the church and as French was the language of the aristocrats. But English made inroads under the last Plantagenet kings, especially Richard II. By the last quarter of the 14th century, not only Chaucer but John Gower, John Lydgate and others writing in English enjoyed the favor and patronage of the aristocratic magnates and royal court. Further away from London, the prose translator John Trevisa worked in English for Thomas, Lord Berkeley in the southwest Midlands. Alliterative poetry was produced by writers from the west Midlands and north, including the very popular work of William Langland (who lived in London and whose readership stretched across England), but alliterative poetry also reached the upper class, as seen in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, apparently written for an aristocratic household in the area of Chester. In an era of strong regional dialects, some of this Middle English sounded strange in the ears of distant audiences, and some of it looked stange to distant readers. English had not yet been made uniform across the country by the introduction of print.

There was pushback against the spread English, especially after the Lancastrian Henry IV with French backing usurped the throne from Richard II. When the expressivity and broadened readership of Middle English came to serve the aims of social and religious dissent, it was the object of official anxiety, official condemnation, and even judicial murder as many Lollard preachers learned. Hostility toward use of English can be seen, among other places, in the harrassment of the very orthodox Margery Kempe, whose “holy conversation” was challenged by church officials as being preaching without license. On the other hand, the church had to say something that the common people could understand, and so those same authorities promoted certain kinds of (uncritical) devotional writing in Middle English, like that of Nicholas Love.

The Lollards, however, had stolen a march on the church, in part because they so often used the widely comprehensible “Central Midlands Standard” dialect. The popularity of their efforts, even in the face of ultimate official condemnation and book burning, is reflected in the 240 (or more) surviving manuscripts of the Wycliffite Bible. This compares with 82 or 83 surviving manuscripts of Canterbury Tales, and about 56 of Langland's Piers Plowman.

Altogether, this work of translation, vernacular religious writing, and debate over its value helped push Middle English prose to higher levels of flexibility, syntactic and rhetorical resources, and intellectual and theological nuance. The fruits of this process are seen in the rich imagery, moving cadences, and theological reach of Middle English mystics such as Julian of Norwich. The practices of oral preaching and debate also lie behind the prompt and (when necessary) highly organized responses of Margery Kempe in her many and sometimes dangerous moments of public confrontation and clerical inquisition. The Wycliffite translation from the Book of John is austerely restrained and carefully non-Latinate in its vocabulary. This contributes to the measured repetition that is part of its aural impact. The imagery of the good shepherd echoes in many directions across Middle English literature, perhaps most famously in the description of the hard-working Parson in the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales: “He was a shepherd and nought a mercenarye” (l. 516). It turns out that the Parson is a good communicator to English speakers: he offers to tell the pilgrims a “merye tale in prose.” The Wycliffite sermon based on this passage in John is similarly restrained; it is traditional in form if not in content. It works by going carefully through the Biblical text and using it to criticize clerical abuses in the established church. Its emotional heightening derives again from conscious repetition of phrases and from alliteration.

John Mirk’s sermon, on a passage in the Second Letter to the Corinthians, represents a standard and approved form of Roman Catholic sermon. It entertains as well as instructs. Mirk leaves the text of the Bible passage behind rather quickly, and makes his points by appeal to popular sayings; then he spins a yarn, an exemplum, to illustrate his point. Indeed, this fantastic tale steals the show. It is a romance from the view of a misogynist cleric, casting a wealthy lady as the villain and the poor but handsome knight as her ambitious accomplice. It is the bard with a magical harp who keeps their castle safe on the long-delayed day of divine vengeance, and it is only this harper who survives its conflagration to tell the story.

With its witnesses dead, the harper's tale can't be verified. It may be the sort of baloney that Chaucer’s Parson in his Prologue (l. 35) refers to when he reproaches those preachers who “tellen fables.” It just the kind of miracle story that Chaucer’s corrupt Pardoner tells, cynically aware of how very effective it can be for his sin-forgiving business. Langland does something not dissimilar, though, in Passus 18 of Piers Plowman, when he introduces Christ as a knight on a quest. Nicholas Love is similarly interested in using drama and concrete detail to draw and hold the attention of his readers. The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ combines biblical narrative with a good deal of legendary material to create an emotive, even sentimental picture of scenes from the life of Christ. And the simple but eloquent morals he draws from these scenes urge his readers to passive virtues that do not threaten the status quo: poverty, meekness, and bodily penance.

Parliament's law allowing the burning of heretics reflected the real anxiety that the Wycliffites were causing in official circles. It equated religious dissent with political subversion.

The confession of Hawisia Moone of Loddon gives a glimpse of what the religious and political establishment feared. To judge by its highly legalistic style, the confession is quite obviously not the straightforward “true report” that it proclaims itself to be, but instead a clerical statement signed under duress by a terrified woman who is bound by the arbitrary authority of the Bishop of Norwich. It is hard to gauge the confession as historical evidence, but it and similar documents suggest that serious religious dialogue was occurring in the villages across the land, where an emerging network of rival preachers were spreading criticism of traditional church beliefs and practices. Moone’s somewhat reductive recital of Lollard tenets should be kept in mind when reading Margery Kempe. Kempe eagerly pursues a whole list of practices condemned by the Lollards, and yet she is accused by her enemy preachers as a Lollard. Kempe's book suggests how any religious deviance or outspokenness could be subject to capital punishment.

Margery Kempe
If one measure of literary achievement is the capacity of a text to arouse passionate response, positive or negative, then Margery Kempe and her ghost writers produced a very great book. Since the discovery of her manuscript in 1934, no other single medieval text has aroused such strong and mixed reaction. In fifteenth-century Lynn and in twentieth-century scholarship, Kempe generated strikingly similar and polarized reactions. Is she a true follower and imitator of Christ, or is she a pretender, a megalomaniac or self-deceived fraud? All we can say for sure is that she is a great illustration of the power of literature to instruct and inform; her life becomes the life of Christ as she imagines it to have been.

Those claiming to have personal vision or experience of God in this period were known as mystics. Margery Kempe is one seeking the kinds of direct, affective contact with the love and sufferings of Christ seen in Richard Rolle and the visions of Julian of Norwich (who are represented elsewhere in our anthology). However, unlike most mystics of her time, Kempe did not withdraw into the inwardness of private prayer and meditation. Instead she transformed the outward conventions of her life. She negotiated tirelessly with her husband and with ecclesiastical authorities to abstain from the conjugal debt of sex, to refrain from certain foods, to wear special clothes, to receive weekly Eucharist and so on. She also engaged with Christ through pilgrimage, by visiting both the site of Christ's self-sacrifice and sites of its imitation by vision and martyrdom.

The late medieval clergy was increasingly threatened by the extent of unsupervised religious quest, unregulated lay preaching, and unorthodox or heterodox speculation within its own ranks. It reacted in various ways, from open-spirited negotiation (which Kempe occasionally encountered) to repressive hostility. One unpopular manifestation of the latter was Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409, which made illegal any theological speculation in the vernacular.

Kempe expressed her links with Christ in highly public fashion, through her tears and sobbing roars, long before that expression painstakingly was reiterated in the form of her book. Her detractors have often accused her of theatricalizing, but her acts were unsurprising in the context of the public ritual and dramas of late medieval civic culture, in which she lived: costume, role playing, emotive experience of the joys of the Virgin or sufferings of Christ were all about her. Public religious rituals especially developed around the feast of Corpus Christi, a holiday that commemorates the last supper and Eucharist with which Kempe’s religious expression is so closely identified. She describes her weeping reaction to a Corpus Christi procession in a chapter not included in our anthology (chapter 45 of her book). Many such events of public religious ritual are mentioned in her book, such as the great scene of Margery and John at Bridlington as they return from Corpus Christi day at York, where no doubt they had witnessed the mystery plays there. In such plays Kempe would have seen how mundane reality is transformed into spiritual reality. Demonstrations are found in "The Second Play of the Shepherds" and also in Mankind and many other medieval plays. These plays are our subject in the next two lessons.